Being the Boat

On the limits of stories; plus, a writing prompt!

Dear reader,

After reading Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets by Kyo Maclear, I have been reflecting on story and narrative as forms that we use to shape our histories, our individual lives, our collective experiences, and our political desires.

I have also noticed while chatting with coworkers, guests, and new friends as a barista that I am full of stories. I surprise myself because I realize that I am only 31 years old and I have lived. I do not mean to suggest that I have lived more than anyone else. I’m just saying I can hear my inner self speak back to me, Okaayy damn, you got stories!

Stories about:

• that time I was heartbroken in high school and went to the movies by myself in the early morning to see For Colored Girls. I was on the A train afterward, crying in an empty cart, when the ex that I was grieving walked up to me to greet me and disappeared swiftly, probably to clear the air of pity—for my sake.

• how later that day, I went to the office of a non-profit that supported me as a student. I sat down to chat with two students who were in the class below mine and attended the same boarding school as my ex. I told them about the moment described above (the movie, the crying, the ex) and noticed that they seemed uncomfortable. Is this TMI? What is going on? Turns out one of them was currently in a relationship with that same ex. *melting face emoji*

• work-place abuse, like the time I walked up to my outdoor classroom in the Dominican Republic to find the Director/Principal already there with all of my students. He asked me to leave, so I, um, walk away from.. my… own… class(?) to sit somewhere random and let my anxiety take over. What the fuck is going on? He comes to get me whenever he is done doing whatever he was doing to reveal to me that he has been facilitating a venting session with my class (also my advisory). I was to meet with him to discuss their complaints. 

• living in Salcedo with my friend Tay as my next-door neighbor, struggling with limited access to water, going on weekend trips to Cabarete, teaching under trees and in empty warehouses in the heat, and loving it all (except for my boss).

• and more work-place abuse (and a terrible discipline system for students) in a brand new charter school in South Seattle, which led to a successful unionizing effort that I was proud to facilitate and support. At the time, my salary was $41,000, which meant I qualified to low-income housing in a gentrifier building and started working my first barista job on the weekends—all while I navigated the stress of my first year of teaching in the U.S., which truly kicked my ass. At the end of that year, just weeks after the union was established for all three schools in the network and the leadership was informed, they left. They left! It seems to me that they could not handle paying all of their teachers a decent wage, guaranteeing a proper lunch, and hiring to replace every single person (except one) who would not be returning to teach at my school after the summer… but this is me speculating.

• how B and I got together the first time and the second time and what we both had to negotiate both times while grounded in immense trust and truetrue love.

• why my best teaching experience (by far) was at a district middle school in SeaTac, WA.

• moving to East Harlem from Seattle and leaving after three months and all the deception (landlords) and threats of violence (insecure Caribbean men) that led to that decision. That’s how we ended up in Jersey City.

And more.

In addition to those anecdotes (which I shared purely for your entertainment, lol) , I also have story arcs that help me sort of summarize my life, such as:

• a journey toward a more grounded sense of self

• a lasting commitment to liberation, disruption, and protest

• a love story

• my path to writing as through my love of books, and now newly committed to poetry through the ways that motherhood opened up my life.

What are yours?

What are the overarching stories of your life so far?

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I have recently—and serendipitously—come across a few different texts that are challenging the ways I have seen stories be prioritized.

Maybe you have come across this quote by Joan Didion:

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

It perfectly summarizes what so many other writers say about story: how it is in our nature as human beings, its role in healing and survival. And I agree, and I cannot write about stories without honoring everything indigenous people have to teach us about the art and power of storytelling. N. Scott Momaday writes,

“Stories are realities lived and believed. They are true.”

That believing in certain stories is what makes them true.

At the same time, as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichi writes, stories can also be tools of destruction. We are all witnessing an example of that now through the ways that Zionism, Islamophobia, and racism spin a narrative that attempts (and fails) to justify an occupation and the genocide of Palestinians.

What gives a story the potential and power to destroy?

Last month, I read Kyo Maclear’s memoir Unearthing. I got really into it because of the family mystery that fell on her lap and really enjoyed her lyrical descriptions all throughout. This book helped me realize the ways that devotion to a story does not necessarily align with real life, how the urge to find or define a story keeps us from truly living and being with the mess and mystery of life. She struggles to find the answers to complete the story of her conception and the life her mother lived before she was born. Life’s circumstances make it impossible for her to “complete” the story. She writes,

“Story is not the only means of remembering our lives.”

Then, she keeps circling back, searching for an expansiveness beyond story that hold the brokenness of life and memory:

“I remember a therapist friend once saying: there is always a moment when the storytelling breaks down and  a client’s need to impress falls away and that is always when the work really starts: when the storyteller moves out of the room.”

What do certain personal, familial, and national stories help us avoid?

I cannot help but think of the ways that politicians capitalize on any moment to weave a narrative: Trump “gets shot,” a hero; any Democrat runs against Trump, a hero. Stories simplify, and because they do, they can be wielded to manipulate an entire nation, a cushion for false promises that we seem to have just accepted as part of the political process. I have recently been most frustrated by the ways that people are using Trump and Project 2025 to pressure people to vote for the Democratic Party at all costs. We can’t let it get worse. If WE put him in office, he will surely keep the seat of power for as long as he can. The U.S. will become unlivable for so many of us.

What about the people for whom the U.S. is already unlivable? What about the so-called felons who are locked in a cage for years and then released into a society that persistently denies them a job and basic decency? What about the people working full-time jobs and living in their car? The person who lost their home because of medical debt? The single mother who cannot get anyone to help her make rent? 

The U.S. is already unlivable for me, unlivable for my husband who gets paid way too little to get between his patients and the police, to advocate for inmates under his care who are being dismissed by everyone who crosses their path from prison to hospital. Unlivable for all of us who are tormented by the fact that the U.S. probably sent more bombs and warplanes to Israel just yesterday, that more people will die under more rubble because of our government’s support for this genocide.

There seems to be no amount of people who are already marginalized, ignored, and dismissed and for whom this system is already unlivable that will make everyone else care enough to organize and do something about it.

But because of The Story dominating the minds of people who cannot think outside of the box of a two-party system, we are not using this opportune moment to show the government that 3rd party nominees are not just there to push the left; they can actually be competitors. They can actually win, if we vote for them. And then there would still be hard work demanded of all of us.

*deep breath*

People choose their stories, are sometimes really loud about it and carry them to the grave.

As an alternative to that, I offer this wonderful excerpt from Unearthing:

Fugitive is also a word for a mother who will not be planted as a character in a book. A mother, full of narrative, who will always resist narrative custom and conventions.

When we are done visiting for the day, I ask my mother to finish the following sentence in as many ways as she can. I begin, “Without a story…”

“Without a story?” she says.

Finish the story, Ma.

“Without a story…” She opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. “Without a story, we have to find another way to settle down… Without a story, we are okay… We will still have rice. Without a story, it’s up to you to keep yourself in shape. Without a story, we make it up. Without a story, we are a boat.”

A boat?

“Yes! A boat. A boat going around and around, rowing through the water.”

Then she laughs.

I want to row through the water. I would rather be with the dissonance that punches me in the stomach every day. Maybe that is why I find myself most devoted to poetry.

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In an interview with The Creative Independent, the writer & poet Madeleine Cravens spoke about the role of arc and plot in her poetry. She said,

“When I realized what I liked to write was poetry, there was this disjunction between being someone who [has] a deep love of story, but who can’t really write in a way that makes a story happen. I see the book [Pleasure Principle] as sort of emblematic of this frustration of really wanting story, wanting cohesion, but what happens when you can’t produce that or you’re not really even living in a way that is conducive to that kind of completion?”

Story as an attempt at completion, and completion as comforting.

I have been so irked by a podcaster who uses a surprising amount of oxygen to defend Biden (because he’s not Trump) and claims to be all for “burning shit down.” “I’m one of y’all, forreal! But what’s the plan? ‘Burn this all down.’ Then what? Give me a plan, and I’m all in!” I roll my eyes because (1) that’s not how it works (and I wish everyone would read about the history of revolutions), and (2) write up this much-needed plan for us then, since you’re one of us. 

I am frustrated while also recognizing that she is so scared (and says so herself). She almost seems newly scared and wrapped up in fresh fear. Well, my fear is stale and pretty grounded at this point. I already know what our government is capable of because I understand history, and I am fully right here in the present. My fear and grief are here to stay.

I want to tell her and all of us:

Consider what we make possible when we let the story break down. 

What opens up when we stop forcing ourselves to stick to a story?

My answer: the poem.

And Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s poem speaks to this:

Ars Poetica

Story takes her skin. Story takes her bones.
She finds her toes and her fingertips.
When she speaks, like salmon running,
the dead and the living converge.
The river of memory rocks
the hunger of claws and tongues.
Electricity swallows itself back
through its double-prod picana,
bullets dislodge themselves from
their chore of destroying
the same day over and over again,
and from the caverns of fear and revision,
skin resurrects the skin.
Each sentence closes in
like the crawl of split skin
sealing its red, wet avulsion.
 
The enormity of the pending night scares the seven assassins on trial.
They understand that in hell, they will eat their own throats.

And here is another poem (medicine for the dissonance):

Late Prayers

By Jane Hirschfield

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally
Including rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
A single nail, a single ruby—
All the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

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Writing Prompt: Refusal

1. List 10 stories that show up in your life, how you think about your life, how you think about your family, how you think about your history, how you think about the future, etc. Summarize them each in a few words, unless your intuition has another plan.

2. Choose one that really stirs you up and free write for 10 minutes in response to the following questions: 

   • What do you like about that story? What do you hate about it? 

   • How long have you been carrying it? Where do you carry it?

   • What sounds, smells, textures, tastes, and images bring this story back into your body?

   • How does it comfort you? 

   • What do you question now? 

   • What remains incomplete?

3. Fill in the blank:

   • Story takes ______________________________

   • Story gives me back my  ____________________

   • Story’s truth is ___________________________

   • Story’s lie: ______________________________

   • When this story fall into pieces it looks like ________________

4. Work with what you got, and make a poem/essay/whatever. Feel free to send it my way!

In solidarity,

Yomalis

Wrong is YOUR Name

On the poetics of wrongness; plus, a writing prompt

Dear reader,

I read Rachel Zucker’s essay “The Poetics of Wrongness,” and a miraculous feeling came over me. All of a sudden I wasn’t an overthinking, hypercritical, restless b*tch who really just needs to find a therapist and focus on understanding how my own wounds make life so unlivable. That is the miracle: the outrageous, bright-as-the-sun idea that maybe I’m not the problem here. 

Zucker defined a poet as “one who feels wrong in a wrong world and is willing to speak even when doing so proves her wrong, ugly, broken, and complicit.” In another essay “Why She Could Not Write a Lecture on the Poetics of Motherhood,” Zucker explains that she wrote her lecture on the poetics of wrongness because everyone around her was telling her that she was wrong. Writing about herself in the third person, she explains, “she felt so wrong she felt herself sinking and sinking into wrongness and realized poetry was always a place she had gone to when she felt wrong or wronged, not to feel better and, no, not to feel right, but to be in wrongness in some right relation.” 

Last month, I started a course at Spirit Rock called A Year To Live that is inspired by Stephen Levine’s book by the same name. One of my classmates mentioned five transformative words that he learned from our teacher Vinny Ferraro: right now, it’s like this. The moment passed as the words remained in a nest of my questions. Is that phrase about acceptance—a way of tricking myself into being cool with whatever—or distance or truth? 

I’m thinking now that it is more about taking a moment to see this moment, state, or condition with clarity. I think it is about the senses and getting as close to our own lives as we can. With Zucker’s words ringing in my mind, I offer this: What if we challenged the original phrase’s neutrality and gave ourselves a mantra for what we witness or experience as wrong? We go from noticing to naming: Right now, this is wrong.

I have only the power to name and love and suffer and die.

– Rachel Zucker

This reminds me of the comfort I never get from advice that asks me to immediately search for what I’m grateful for when I’m in distress—make a list! Go! Babies! Husband! Home! Water! Breath!—and I am supposed to feel better except I actually don’t. My really great boss told me a story about a guy with a tattoo that says “TWO” who reveals that it stands for “Things Work Out.” I feel no relief. Things Work Out for whom? Whose permanent and eternal truth is this? Not mine. Things Work Out so don’t stress what is actually stressful? Things Work Out so I let the uncomfortable feelings pass and *poof* into a cloud of inaction? I would rather accept the fuckery as fuckery. Right now, this is wrong. It might get better. I might have to do something about it (externally or internally). Still, right now, it’s messed up. And my body says, Thank you for saying that.

Among Zucker’s many definitions and descriptions of the poetics of wrongness emerged this one: “it is a poetics of what is.” That brings us back to Right now, it’s like this, but it doesn’t end there: “It is a poetics of what is, not what would be nice, and certainly not what is considered nice/best/normal/universal by those in power.” Living in my body, I am familiar with how the interests of those in power do not serve me, which is why I need words to anchor me while I face the decisions that have been made against me/us on a daily basis. “Right now, this is wrong,” I can say, feeling the ground beneath me instead of my hands going numb. My being is not wrong and the land is not wrong, but there is a wrong here, right now. To June Jordan’s I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name I add: Wrong is YOUR name. (You: U.S. government, You: Israel.)

You ever pick up a book with a subtitle like “Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation” and realize that it is not about the kind of suffering and liberation you had in mind? I get a similar feeling when I hear or read about acceptance or surrender as a mindfulness practice, when I read about how we all make ourselves suffer by resisting reality. To quote Zucker again: “There is a very big difference between being incarcerated in your body and having your body incarcerated.” I know that there is wisdom for me in those teachings, but it bothers me how rarely they acknowledge systemic oppression. I will continue to explore this, but in the meantime,

I invite you into the practice of conscious refusal.

Talk your shit with colleagues, neighbors, partners, and children: Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Point and yell. Whisper or write it down. Say it when you know it: Right now, this is wrong. Watch how it brings people together, inspires strikes, and gets the right people out of leadership positions. Feel how it calms the body, how you can settle into the coziest corner in your own body, when you tell yourself the truth. 

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Writing Prompt: Refusal

“Perhaps some people feel better when they write poetry. Perhaps some poems make the world less wrong. What I’m trying to explain is that a poet’s athleticism lies in her ability to stay in and with wrongness.”

– Rachel Zucker

1. Make a list of 10 things you do not accept or un/consciously refuse. Which wrongs feel closest to you right now? What are you supposed to accept but can’t (yet)?

2. Challenge this notion: Refusal is oppositional/antagonistic/hostile. Fill in the blank five times.

   • Refusal is ___.

   • Refusal is ___.

   • Refusal is ___.

   • Refusal is ___.

   • Refusal is ___.

3. Freewrite for ten minutes with these questions in mind:

   • What does refusal look, feel, sound like?

   • To what extent does refusal consume you? How do you refuse and keep living?

   • Consider what it means to have a “tantrum” and make space for yours on the page: “an uncontrolled outburst of anger or frustration”—go for it.

4. Write a poem that refuses something or emanates refusal. 

5. Send me your poem, pleeeease!!!

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THE STREAM

where I share writing/art that I have like from different literary magazines:

“Thick Time” (poem) by Tracy Fuad

“Being Here” and “5 Lives” (poems) by Theo Legro

“Bonus Child” (Essay?) by Beina Xu

In solidarity,

Yomalis

Living with Truth

On contemplating death and the archetype of Scorpio

Dear reader,

I began this year with a meditation course that introduced me to the practice of reciting the five remembrances every morning and every evening. While I am still working toward more consistency with this practice, I am already transformed by having these truths greet me from the wall on my left when I sit at my desk. Here they are for you:

I felt an immediate shift with this new practice. The night of the first day that I read these statements aloud, I was in my bed facing my husband who had already fallen asleep. I was jealous because I knew my mind was going to do what it does most nights: walk me through every worry that did not manage to get my attention all day, every horrible possibility that could cause me deep pain as soon as right now—how do I know for sure that our baby is still breathing? and on and on. When I was newly postpartum, I got into the habit of listening to podcasts while I fell asleep to keep me from the nightly torture of anxiety. (My favorite go-to for this was Barbara Brown Taylor’s interview with Krista Tippett for the podcast On Being—always so soothing.)Last month, I started a course at Spirit Rock called A Year To Live that is inspired by Stephen Levine’s book by the same name. One of my classmates mentioned five transformative words that he learned from our teacher Vinny Ferraro: right now, it’s like this. The moment passed as the words remained in a nest of my questions. Is that phrase about acceptance—a way of tricking myself into being cool with whatever—or distance or truth? 

On this night, I interrupted this pattern by repeating the five remembrances to myself. I cried quietly as I imagined my husband dying and my children getting sick. I let myself grieve, and then something shifted. There was no horror story for me to spin. Because I had already met those truths and let myself feel them, I freed myself from the burden of anticipation. Yes, it can happen. Yes, it will be so painful. Yes, there are people who survive this pain.

Of course, it did not eliminate my anxiety altogether. (Now, instead of stressing about the future, I ruminate over the regrets of my past.) Still, I am grateful that I found a way to interrupt the vivid and fearful visualizations of death that kept me from sleep. It allows me to relax into these hard truths, letting the hard truths hold me. Again, my whole being sighs and says, Thank you for telling me the truth.

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Many of you are my dear friends and know that I have a Pisces Sun. What many of you may not know is that I have Scorpio Rising, and I lovelovelove the Scorpio archetype. In You Were Born For This, Chani Nicholas summarizes Scorpio’s style with these two words: “intense, penetrating.” Pair that with Pisces as “intuitive, creative,” and if you know me personally or follow me on IG, then you’re probably already like “Okay! Damn!” because yes, it is very much a summary of me.

Quickly moving past talk of Scorpio’s “sexual magnetism" (hahhahaa), Scorpio is associated with truth-telling, emotional strength, and transformation as well as self-sabotage. According to Chani, Scorpio is willing to suffer to prove a point.

Where Scorpio lives within me strengthens me and brings to mind how much I listen to my own suffering. In some ways, I see myself as devoted to my suffering by being devoted to the end of my (& our) needless suffering. It is this overwhelming condition that steers me toward spirituality, discovering different ways of knowing myself, and being more present in the practice of living. It is the Scorpio in me that completed a death doula training while pregnant in 2021, that turns to the tarot almost daily and has the five remembrances taped to a wall in her home.

In The Inner Sky, Steven Forrest summarizes the essence of Scorpio with a brief visualization that begins with you lying in a sleeping back in the early morning:

With that scorpion in your belly, only the awesome intensity of the present moment remains. Everything else—all pretense, all vanity, all ambition—is ripped away. Only essentials remain. And mind, naked and alert, focused sharp as a cut gem, stands ready to live or die.

That attitude, that state is consciousness, is Scorpio.

Only essentials remain.

Very Scorpio of me to say: That’s what I call some goddamn perspective.

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To return to the root

is peace.

Peace: to accept what must be,

to know what endures.

In that knowledge is wisdom.

— Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching

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Forrest writes about how Scorpio achieves a certain level of self-knowledge by thinking about death:

Morbidity is not the point…The strategy is to fully accept into consciousness the reality of one’s own inescapable death. To let death serve as a counselor. To feel the fear, to let it stir up emotions, and then to ask death the critical question: “Given that my time here is limited, what should I do next? What is really important to me? Which of my commitments and behavior patterns are based on the insane assumption that I am physically immortal?”

This is what I am reaching for when I aim to contemplate death as a daily practice: a living practice that help me stand and act on what is essential, what I decide or realize really matters.

So far, it has revealed to me a few matters that used to dictate so many of my daily actions:

• grades & academic degrees

• career goals & money

• pleasing other people, especially my employers

• physical appearance.

I can see more clearly now how I abandoned myself for everything above. I also look around and see more clearly how a culture of self-abandonment makes it easier abandon others.

Now, I live around this question a lot: What really matters?

“Shining the light of death on my life” helps me return to this question often and find some answers (Frank Ostaseski).

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James Baldwin describes death as “the only fact we have.”

I’m beginning to think of the third remembrance in particular as a First Truth: an initiation into a practice that teaches us how to relate to what is true, how to welcome truth into our actions. I don’t think we can have an intimate relationship with the First Truth of death without letting the fact of death inform our daily lives and help us truly live as beings in community.

But here’s where I take a turn:

I also find myself pleading let me live because some of us have had to swing a blade and climb out of the rubble to keep our own lives & lineages.

Even as I begin to see my own life as truly sacred, I am still be living under a system that willingly forsakes my health and my life.

Many of us come from people who not only know death as a fact but also as a weapon.

Every now and then I come across the notion that “Not all things are meant to last” and when it echoes in my mind I start to hear, “Not all people are meant to last.” Yes, horrible, but I hear it because I see it and live it as Black Dominican mother living in a city on Medicaid and food stamps. That is what my husband sees every single day as an EMT in Newark, NJ. It is the declaration at the heart of every settler-state (yes, Israel, and also the U.S.). It is the justification for labeling a whole people as a “problem” and attempting to eliminate them. This is how we end up in a place where white & wealthy people are granted the legitimacy to be seen as ill, deserving of treatment, deserving of protections and a certain quality of life.

What does it mean to seek death’s wisdom while living a reality in which some of us suffer and die disproportionately?

And, at this point in my reflection, all I have to say is: I don’t know.

I don’t know what to do with that except finally write it down and share it because I have yet to come across a Buddhist teacher, grief expert, or death doula willing to tell this truth.

So I leave you with another question:

When you contemplate death for a moment,

when you strip your life all the way down,

what remains? What endures?

In solidarity,

Yomalis

How Do We Hold It All?

Dear reader,

I will begin with a couple of my core beliefs:

• I believe in the complete dismantling of current U.S. systems in order to end the needless suffering of all marginalized people. 

• I understand that a true revolution will require that some of us give up the many or few privileges and comforts that we have, and I am prepared to accept that because I want everyone to live with dignity.

• Liberation work is not easy nor comfortable but still necessary.

I also care about my body, mind, and spirit. I care about how I feel in my day-to-day life. I love working, but I also want to live. I want to be well & grounded, strong & smiling easily, open & wise. 

What I feel more often is: uneasy, frantic, isolated and eager for more isolation, useless

like a torn up paper bag letting the wind widen my tears and drift me toward the river

to drown or toward a fresh pile of shit

to feel sorry for myself or toward a very clean window with a view

of genocide happening right over there 

to drown again most miserably.

I know we are all bearing witness to a genocide.

When was the last time you bore witness to your own life? 

Have you noticed the expansive and tiny ways our government has abandoned you or your neighbor? Do you know where your local jail or prison is and how the people live in cages? Do you owe some corporation money for simply being sick? Is there lead in your water?

I know some of you, like me, can’t help but notice. For some of us, it gets thrown in our faces all too often and keeps breaking our hearts. For the rest of us—maybe white, maybe getting paid six figures, maybe neutralized by religion, etc.—it might be harder to notice the panic attack you are always trying to suppress on your way to work, the hopelessness buried in your indifference or silence, the life force lacking in your work and in your eyes, the way you dehumanize or laugh at a Black man living with mental illness for attacking the judge refusing to grant him probation, and every time you stop short of asking a powerful question.

There’s a genocide happening right over there, and that genocide is a project that our government has chosen to support and fund with our tax dollars. Doesn’t that make genocide feel like our next door neighbor, like Riker’s Island and Flint’s water crisis right over there? 

I want to notice it all because I want to stay ready. I see with History and have a family to protect.

I believe we all need to notice it all, but

how do we hold it all?

How do we hold ourselves through extreme vulnerability and sustained suffering? And how do we take one step toward self-preservation, self-defense, systemic change, and a free Palestine?

I don’t know.

So I will be reading, meditating, paying attention, showing up with these questions at the forefront

and writing to you all so that we can figure this out together.

I appreciate you for seeing my words as worth reading.

In solidarity,

yomalis